I think it's sort of like.
Welcome everybody to the Bob Western Library for special collections where we
have under our feet some of the great treasures of Oxford's University Library.
And over our heads, the readers and the researchers who are scraping their chairs back and forth as it may be, but intently looking at those.
And one of those for the past two terms has been Dr. Karen Schaefer, who's our speaker today,
Karen Chambers, head of the conservation workshop at the University Library of Leiden in the Netherlands.
She began her training as a student of the history of art, but switched her studies to book and paper conservation.
Starting her conservation career in the municipal archives in Amsterdam,
she's a regular guest lecturer on the course for book conservators in the Netherlands on such topics as historic finding structures,
mediaeval book bindings and oriental paper. Karin founded the Conservation Workshop for Special Collections at the University Library Leyden,
a library which has many historical connexions with the Bodleian Library.
The unique and internationally renowned Oriental collections at Leiden offered Karen a conservation challenge,
which she took up with characteristic enthusiasm starting in 2011 alongside her work at the library.
She undertook a Ph.D. at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts and Society,
and this was completed and published in 2015 by BRILLE as the technique of Islamic bookbinding.
This work received the Delacorte prise, which is awarded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.
As I said, we've been very fortunate to have Dr. Schaefer here during the past two terms as a
visiting fellow at the board in libraries under the Buhari Visiting Fellowship scheme,
and I'm pleased to say that under that scheme, also,
we will be making a further call for applications for next year 2020 21, and applications will be invited this month.
So please look at the body and fellowships website to see those.
I'm very pleased to introduce our Speaker Dr Account Shaper.
Thank you very much for such a kind introduction, and it's very nice to see so many faces.
I would just like to ask if you are interested in that Baha'i Fellowship or one of
the other fellowships do do take the invitation seriously because I'm myself very,
very grateful that I have the opportunity to to compare the work with the
collections here and also compare them to the collections that we have in late.
And it's it's certainly an enormous enrichment of all of what I can do.
I would like to start with saying that our perception of things of people and culture is very interesting,
and usually I think our observations are not neutral.
We are fed views through history by others, and that makes us looking through things at things through a certain lens.
And I'm just the other week I read a wonderful article this this article here on the screen,
which is such a good example of that phenomenon that I would like to take you through this little little world
of Strauss's first before I start talking about kicks and the story starts with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
She travelled to Constantinople together with her husband, who was a British ambassador in 1769.
Now, once there, she learnt the language and as a woman.
And also because of her class, she had access to the homes of the Turkish Ottoman women,
which had always been closed to male travellers and other men working there before her eyewitness accounts of the daily life and the customs,
and therefore whose observations that no men could have made.
She also wrote letters to her sister and friends, and after her death in 1762,
these letters were published and she wrote, amongst other things, about the dress of Turkish Ottoman women.
She had adapted this dress herself. She fields felt very free and comfortable in the Turkish Ottoman dress,
and she also wrote and about the social and legal freedoms of the women that she had met.
And they had more rights over the property, for example, than women in England at the time had this view was confirmed by others.
The British traveller, Juliet Pardue, for example,
she wrote in 1838 it is depression in Europe to pity the women of the East, but it is ignorance of their real position.
The early 19th century saw the rise of women's rights, women's rights movements, which included it may seem trivial,
but it was a very important thing a call for dress reform because the stifling corsets and the long, very heavy skirts were very much disliked.
To any woman, women's rights activist, the Turkish Strauss's then seemed a very promising alternative for respectable ladies and Amelia Bloomer,
living in Seneca Falls and founder of the first newspaper for women in the United States, started wearing such trousers.
But they appear to be a topic of very much debate. The Turkish pantaloons were renamed bloomers after Amelia,
but rejected for their Turkishness suffragists like them for the sense of liberation and social equality.
But from the conservative Christian point of view, wearing a Muslim dress was something very close to blasphemy.
And gradually the bloomer disappeared from the screen from the seat.
I should say she will disappear. And then when when women Strauss's re-emerged in the early 20th century, they often took the shape of men's trousers.
And in our common memory, the notion that 19th century women deliberately choose the fashion of other women
who represented rights and freedoms and not of other men is quite forgotten.
And that is probably because we are not really aware of this favourable historic position that women in Islamic societies had.
This example illustrates how our common sense of history is shaped by perspectives and in the field of book history,
where the point of departure often is western, we see a similar phenomenon.
Values are related to the Western narrative and Western dominance, but this was not always so when the book emerged as an object.
The people of the Mediterranean and Middle East, as a lot of fields seem to share ideas.
They used what they needed given these circumstances and available materials in the diverse areas and book, people need to be very practical.
And that is how different book traditions came about and developed.
So in these early centuries and there was so much cultural exchange.
But we see and particular eagerness in the people from the West to have products and luxury goods from the Middle East.
And so the books making the difference came to have a major influence on the development of book binding and manuscript production in Europe.
Now this is an example of an early 14th century book probably made in Egypt, and more than two centuries later,
books were produced in France, and the techniques to make them may be slightly different.
But you can see that the idea of that design style was really inspired on those first productions of manuscripts from the Middle East.
You see the centre stamp at the corner of stamps,
and this is another or two other examples from the Middle East and manuscripts from Persia and one from Bursa.
And what I think is also interesting to see here. So except from the general layout, the sent to stamp the elements shape the intrinsic,
very tiny but perfectly executed tooling in the in the frame lines.
The book that was made and bound in Rome was made for a cardinal,
and apparently it was no problem at all that the language of the declaration actually came from the Islamic world.
And then one more example of a Koran from the early 16th century, and you see that wonderful opening page with the spiral style,
which you can also see in that ceramic plate that is currently on display in the Ashmolean Museum.
And that a spiral style is very much associated with the Ottoman world.
And again, when books were made in France for very wealthy collectors,
that very different cultures and the source of an inspiration was no problem at all.
And you can see perhaps. So when I enlarge that field and even take out the colour, you can see how to design really is very, very much alike.
But it was just not just only this stylistic elements, it's really about materials and techniques.
So the sort of things that were brought from the Middle East into the Western bookmaking tradition is,
for example, the use of leather W's gold tooling, leather only leather filigree.
So that very fine cutting out of leather,
working with different colours that was widely embraced in Venice to start with and then brought further materials to in the Middle East.
Paper was used for many centuries before it came into Europe and because there was a lot of paper there,
of course, was waste paper and with waste papers and book binders could make paste paper boards.
And in Europe at the time, they were still using wood for boards and that make made books heavier and lumpia and
the use of paste paper course gave them actually a chance to make more delicate books.
And apart from piece paper boats, we also see the introduction of mobile paper, for example, here the sheets, but of course,
they were used on the books and the books travelled, and that is how the West got acquainted with the techniques of marbling.
And then finally, a very late example, but also striking so very early 20th century, a leather w with leather inlay.
And I think it's it's quite clear to see that the stylistic influence of Persian leopard bindings,
which very often have these painted insides of their covers, still had and was an inspiration for bookbinding elsewhere.
But then it's very much about decoration and how things look.
The the importance of the technique and all the materials that were brought through
the Middle East were actually quite forgotten in the common memory of the West.
And the loss of judgements about the quality of the bindings from that region is probably first from post mediaeval
times when the economic and political power shifted and Europe emerged as a more confident entity on the world stage.
By then, the printing presses were running full speed and had changed Western society very much.
And book history became Eurocentric. Even though many of our history books say that the printing of books was invented by Gutenberg,
about 40 and 50 more nuanced sources will mention that printing is barely older than that.
That was block printing before, and Gutenberg only developed printing with loose type, even more nuanced sources.
We'll start the history of printing in the forest because apart from the block printing,
they also used ceramic and loose metal types to make books as early as the 11th century.
And the importance of China as the source of paper making is also widely known.
So these two areas are really in our common memory.
And this, for example, is probably known by many of you.
It's in the British Museum and it's considered the oldest, oldest printed book,
even though it's not a book in the sense of a codex as we know it, it's a scroll, but it's certainly a group.
And then this is the earliest extant book, which is a codex, a printed with loose type,
and it's from Korea from the 14th century, so well before Gutenberg printed his book.
But examples from Central Asia and the Middle East are very, very hard to find.
So a book like this, it's also a scroll.
It's a tiny one because it was worn as an amulet, so it was rolled up and held in a container,
but it's printed and it's even printed in multiple colours and dates to the 12th century.
And here is another example which is kept in the David Collection in Copenhagen.
And it's thought to be even older.
So again, in the Militech menu of three modern manuscripts a printed item printed in colour from the 11th and possibly even the 10th century.
And this little gap in the history of printing is also visible in our history of paper making.
When I was trained as a paper conservative paper and conservator in the early 90s, we had to read the very thick volume,
the history of paper making, and it was thought that when we had read that we would know everything that we need to know.
But that was not necessarily the case because in in what we then learnt was that for some reason,
the technique of paper making sort of miraculously appeared in Spain and Italy.
A thousand years after that, it was invented in China.
And of course, there is the whole area in the middle that was very, very important.
So the work of the people in that area really needs to be acknowledged in that story, and fortunately,
people like Don Baker and Jonathan Bloom and Alexander Soter, you have filled that gap for us.
So we know now that after it was invented in China, the technique of papermaking went eastwards to Japan and Korea and to Vietnam in the South,
but certainly also via the different Silk Roads to the West,
where it arrived already in seven fifty in summer accounts and then spread through the Arab world, the north of Africa, and then came to Spain.
And this is an example from the Leiden collections. It's one of the earliest dated manuscripts 1866, and the quality of the paper is wonderful.
It's very thick, it's quite brown. But you can also see that it is not discoloured.
It's it's of a very, very good quality.
And it's very different from the paper that was first produced in the Far East because their sources were different.
Paper was made from the mulberry tree. And so here you can see a few stages of that making.
The bark was used, but needed to be cleaned, needed to be washed, needed to be beaten into a pulp,
and then the pulp could be spreading it to with more water and then the paper maker could do his work.
But the paper mulberry tree did not grow in Central Asia and other sources needed to be used hemp and flax fibres, but also rags were used.
And one of the important things that the people from the Islamic world added to the
technique of paper and the knowledge of paper making is a sort of industrialisation,
if you will.
So they developed these betas that speeded up the beating process of the fibres because it was a very learnt society and they needed lots of books.
So this allowed them to make the paper that they really needed.
And this then is an image of what the paper maker looked like.
He has two elements the tool there is that rigid wooden screen that keeps the flexible paper making moulds in place when he deposits into the VAT.
So you would think now that we know that.
It's the understanding of the paper transmission becomes easier,
but there still are misunderstandings in a book focussing on global trade and use of paper in the Islamic world, which was published in 2018.
As recent as that and the foreword for what was written by a Western paper historian.
And it was stated that Western paper was stronger and more durable than Islamic paper,
and that after the Islamic world brought paper knowledge to Europe,
the superior European paper circled back because being gelatine sized,
it would be better suited to the climate, and I would say that is a misinformed opinion.
Here you see some examples of early manuscripts made of paper in the Islamic world
and these lovely silk things that are not out to the front margins of the pages.
And we use this page markers. So they allowed the reader of the books to get quick access to a certain chapter or another text, or, for example,
in one of the books that is about dream explanation that the different dreams all have a silk page,
marker and page so that you could get to these different dreams and explanations rather quickly.
And here you see a few other examples and these notes how beautiful that paper is.
It's not this colour around the edges. It's creamy white.
It's very strong, even though it is 600 years old. And because of the good quality of this paper, people could not be silk.
Little clings to the to the edges. But mistakes reflect several mistaken views and that we see already in the 17th
and 18th century and in several traveller accounts such as that of John Sheridan.
He travelled in Persia and he was very interested in in in different trades and professions.
So he he visited and he expresses his disappointment about the poor quality of papermaking as well.
But after visiting a book, Find it, and I've always felt it's such a funny thing.
And he states it will be difficult to believe, but these binders do not even know how to bind a book properly in one piece of leather instead,
and says they take two pieces that are glued together on the spine.
But he actually refers to a technique that is so common in the Islamic world.
So you can see it here.
The yellow at Arrow points to that scene, where the two pieces overlap, so both boards are covered in a separate piece of leather.
I hope the drawings make it a bit more clear if you need that bit of technical explanation.
So this is where the seam of the two pieces is, and this is where they actually overlap.
And it is a technique that was introduced because it allowed the book binders to work on the boards separately to to to create these beautiful,
elaborate decorations on them.
It was one of the techniques that allowed them to make lecturer bindings, for example, because these boards were made by different artists.
So it is rather characteristic of books in the Islamic world.
Misconceptions, of course, are usually caused by a lack of misunderstanding and also a preset idea of what something should look like.
And that is what explains this means misinterpretation as well.
So what is then a typical Islamic manuscript?
Well, more or less, it looks like this an important thing is that the boards are flush with the text block,
so you have a compact manuscript and the gatherings are sewn in a relatively easy manner, using an unsupported links to sowing.
And once the structure is finished, the covering letter is based directly onto the spine.
So we have a tight flat spine and an envelope flap is very often attached to the left board, which is used to protect the forge of the textbook.
But precisely because of that simplicity,
the structure can be misunderstood so that that simple stitch in the middle was actually used in Western books as well.
But Western Book binders used it when they made ephemeral materials.
So a school book or perhaps a theatre play, something that was functional for a while and then could be thrown out.
And then these books were simply covered with a paper wrapper, something limit and not too expensive.
So this technique of sewing was actually associated with something that was not really up to the standards of other Western books.
And if you like that overlooks the importance of several other features that you can see when you look at the books well.
So for example, the tie down to head and tail of the manuscript. These little pieces of thread connects all the gatherings to the spine lining,
and they were applied to every gathering and it's a very essential part of the Islamic bookmaking.
You can see it here on the spine. And of course, that's also one of the advantages of a conservator.
You have access to the interior of books when books are damaged.
So these are things that I get to see on my workbench and are not necessarily also accessible to readers in a reading room, of course.
So this book has lost its leather spine,
but you can see the cloth spine lining and you can see all these districts connecting the lining to all the gatherings.
And this is a very tiny manuscript.
It's an octagonal manuscript, and therefore the spine is very small.
But as you can see, even though the spirits are damaged by now,
but even the small gatherings were sewn individually and they all have tie downs at head and tail.
So it was considered an essential thing of the book making.
One of the other things that probably has confused Western people looking at Islamic books is the use of leather for the spine lining.
So we in the previous example, we looked at a cloth lining, but very often leather was used to line the textbook spine.
And then the extending sides of that piece of lining was pasted onto the inside of the board to to strengthen the board attachments.
But you can see how that really sits integrally in in the structure and on a real life manuscript.
You can recognise it like this. So here you see two pieces of leather, and it's that part that is part of the construction.
It's the leather spine lining and the threats of the bent pass through it.
But this was a very unknown manner of working for people in the West, and therefore especially when leather duplass are used,
which were chosen to resemble the leather of the of that leather spine linings of the structure and the colour is very much the same.
It is very difficult to see that we're actually looking at two different components in the binding.
And that's probably has partly caused to the idea led to the idea that the bookbinding of an Islamic
manuscripts were simply made as a cassette used as a separate entity and then moved on to this fine.
But that there would not be a structural structural connexion.
But of course there is. So when manuscripts came into Western collections, we very often see that Western book binders,
we banned the items partly because of misunderstandings.
Of course, also because these books could have been damaged and then they could not repair the damage.
The oriental ways so they use their own techniques.
And this is a nice example of a beautiful early lack of binding, and it has been reversed by the western bookbinder.
So the lack of painting used to be on the exterior of the binding and the slap should be on the left sides of the book on the back.
But as this is figural, you couldn't turn it around because down all the people would be upside down, so it was transferred to the France.
And perhaps it's also intentional. And Bookbinder may have thought this is a better protection for that beautiful painting, which in a way is true.
But then the original leather interior of the boards has that filigree work,
which is also very fragile because these pieces of leather are really very thin.
And this now sits on the outside of this binding.
In this case, something different happens. It's a staff of each manuscript and binding,
and that the bookbinder who worked on this decided that this manuscript should have larger boards because probably the idea that
the boards would be flush with a manuscript that would leave the edges of the manuscript rather vulnerable to damage and dirt,
perhaps. So there need to be larger boards that was square and extended, and therefore he lifted the letter from the original board on the outside.
And he also lifted that the leather filigree on the inside of the former boards,
then cut to speaker boards pasted everything back, of course, needed a lot more leather to cover these larger edges.
And on the inside, he finished the the the open edges of that new board with strips of marble paper, and it is a colourful composition anyway.
So. And here you could also see that, of course, the manuscript was also sewn.
So we have now sewing support introduced in the structure.
So we have these reports on the spine and and in the whole process, everything was precise as well.
So the the nice relief that the original boards have had is now gone.
And this is another.
Arabic manuscript that simply was bound to and I think what you can call the library binding, so nothing fancy something to protect the manuscript.
And just in the opening page, you can see that faint trace of the flap that used to be there of the former binding.
And it's it's an understandable work.
The only thing that you can say is that these Western structures often lead to a manuscript that doesn't open so well anymore.
And in the case of manuscripts with a map like this, it doesn't really open so fluently, so the map itself is less accessible than it used to be.
One of the collections that I work with here in the book is that the Persian manuscript collections
that were collected by Gore and William Sleep and they worked and lived and travelled in in Persia,
in the eighteen tents and collected many, many manuscripts.
And they also had many of their manuscripts to be bound for a different reason, I think, which we will look at in a moment.
And many of the manuscripts are protected by these wonderful bats, and there are quite a few of them.
I haven't seen all their manuscripts, so this is just a selection of what I think.
Well, what is there? But it could be more. But you see different pieces of types of textile, but also two different shapes.
So there is there's the bag with the three buttons that has a square format.
And then there is the bag with an envelope appointee closing closing flap that only had one
button and that one is inspired on banks that were actually originally used in the region.
So with the bags that we find on the manuscripts from in The O.C. and Elliot's collection,
it's very difficult to say at the moment whether where they had been made was that in the region or was that perhaps when the books were brought back?
But this is the type of bag that you would find in the region.
So an example in Glasgow, one in a private collection,
but also this one was posted on social media just a few weeks ago because it's a new acquisition of the university in Birmingham.
And they liked the bank very much. Of course.
But what the what William and grossly did was, I think, because we have these records of that.
They were in Esfahan in 1811 and they bought a bunch of loose lacquered copies, and many of these copies looked like this.
They have lots of similarities. So probably they were from a sort of commercial source.
And because they held the position of culture in such high regard,
these books make the impression that they actually let them be bound in letter thoughts because that would heighten their authenticity.
It would make them even more important.
So I think the paint is worked from certain templates, and they just use different colours to to get the variety.
Just one more thing about the Western book binders when they interfere with the books and you see a Western bookbinding and a book,
probably with its original words, but rebuilt by a western binder.
So what a western binder would do is after sewing, he cut the edges also because they then could be easily gilded or dyed red.
And in this case?
But that makes the boards larger than the textbook is, and you can see that, for one thing, that causes damage to the corners of these bindings.
But also it is for reasons of construction, not the best thing to do.
I think and there are many examples in Western collections that will show you what happens to books when they have large squares,
when they have these boards that extends over the text block, where the printed manuscript.
But when these books stand on the shelves and the textbooks are very heavy,
they start sagging and that then first causes damage at the head and later on at the table.
And in thinking about constructions and perhaps judging the making of books in a different culture,
I think it would have been a nice if they at least would have seen that perhaps keeping debauched flush
with the manuscripts was actually a very good idea because then you would prevent this sort of damage.
Now, this is a little deceptive scene.
Because I'm looking at these these books from the forest,
because I think that when when we look at how our the Western Book history developed and evolved,
you can see that the the heritage, the objects from the forest where we got it differently, from the heritage, from the Islamic world.
And even though in the 19th and early 20th century,
books may have been rebound when they came into Western collections or in the possession of Western owners.
And there still is that sense of some something being different.
So the idea of a flaw in the structure of Islamic manuscripts has percolated through into our common knowledge, if you will.
And I really think that conservatives book conservatives nowadays would never
interfere with a structure like this in the Japanese and Chinese free inflexions,
because these books are so clearly different from our Western books, and therefore they are respected for what they are.
And you wouldn't change them, whereas.
With books from the Islamic world, which are much closer to our own heritage, and therefore perhaps we think we understand them better.
But we've seen many, many suggestions to improve the structures.
They should become more like ours in a way. So the interventions treatments, for example,
have been at aligning and do your sewing through that longing or add a few sewing stations because that will make the book stronger.
And one of the other suggestions has been add a hollow.
So instead of a tight spine and this hollow will support a text block and perhaps the binding as well.
And I've tried that once. And for those of you who were in the Khalili Research Centre when I gave a lecture a few weeks ago,
you will know that I do not think this was a very good idea.
I really think that we should keep these objects as representatives of the heritage where they come from.
So. And that's. A group like this.
So concluding, I think we have inherited that biased view.
But I would really like to to keep the physical qualities and the material properties of these items as they are.
And let's then we turn to Lady Mary Kay Montague.
She pointed out misperceptions of previous male travellers about Turkish women and her gender
provided her with access to the ladies in the Ottoman world that was so close to male visitors,
and therefore she was much better informed and she could correct that view.
And this too, holds relevance to the bigger picture. To prevent misconceptions, insight, knowledge and a thorough understanding is key.
And this means that conservatives with that practical experience may be better informed than art
historians or text scholars when it comes to structural details and questions about materiality.
It certainly also means that we need a joint effort to write a more complete and inclusive history.
And we certainly need to be aware of our western lens when we look at these manuscripts.
And on that note, I would like to say thank you for listening.